JBS slashes 500 jobs as live export trade cuts herd numbers

Adam was born in New South Wales and was educated at the prestigious Scots College in Sydney.
He has worked both in Australia and United Kingdom for some of the largest newspapers in the two respective countries.
He joined APN as a senior journalist at The Chronicle in Toowoomba in 2010, before moving to APN’S Brisbane Newsdesk in 2013 where he covered politics and court.
Adam won a 2015 Queensland Clarion Award - the state's premier journalism awards - and was named 2011 APN Daily Reporter of...

I write in relation to your story "JBS slashes 500 jobs as live export trade cuts herd numbers".

Very limited cattle are drawn from south eastern Queensland for live export. For starters, the logistics to market are challenging and very expensive with the nearest export ports being Townsville or Portland in south-western Victoria. Brisbane only exports a small volume of specialist niche Wagyu cattle export trade. Secondly, livestock exporters draw heavily on northern Brahman type cattle which are particularly well suited to our major export markets like Indonesia and Vietnam. This is why the live export trade is so important to northern Australian producers for jobs and income.

The meat workers' union campaign against the live trade ignores the fact that the cost of processing in Australia - 1.5 to 3 times the cost of processing an animal in other countries -is the greatest threat to abattoir jobs.

As part of the inquiry into the effect of market consolidation on the red meat processing sector, JBS Australia's submission showed that processing costs in Australia are 2.4 times higher than those in the United States, 3 times higher than Brazil and 1.5 higher than New Zealand.

Excluding labour, the two major areas of difference between Australia and the US is in government regulation and energy costs. In regulation costs Australia is around $10 per head more than the US and $15 per head more in energy costs. If we look at labour cost differentials, a skilled boner in Australia costs about $30 an hour (before on-costs of between 40-42 per cent) compared to $16 per hour in New Zealand and $15 per hour in the US.

Livestock exporters appreciate the core concern of local abattoir workers is certainty in having a job. That is a freedom all workers want and deserve. But the threat to that freedom is not live export and it is wrong to dress-up the live trade as the workers' bogeyman.

The case for an effective ban on the live export is short-sighted and fails to acknowledge the consequences - turning cattle producers into the working poor by artificially restricting their market options, while shrinking our export capacity to service global customer demand for our quality meat.

There are several real threats to the future of Australia's red meat sector, but the live export trade is not one of them. Let's put our energies are into growing the "red meat pie" so that all stakeholders in the livestock and red meat sectors can share the benefits. Cutting avoidable and unnecessary red tape is a good place to start.